What would life look like stripped of technology, in a possible post-disaster future? That’s the question posed by Greg Rook in his atmospheric and rather ominous Off-grid series of paintings, which you can see at the Aldridge theatre in Farnham till 10 December.
One of Greg’s inspirations for these paintings was The Good Life, first broadcast in 1975, which seemed to embody the ideals of making-do and self-reliance, and suggest a possible future in which these values would triumph. Or would it? He describes the Off-grid series as ‘mock heroic paintings of our past potential futures’. They’re a reinvention of 1970s ideas of what might lie ahead, but also draw on off-grid movements and communes of today and of the past.
Apparently prepping stores (where you can get everything you need to survive an apocalypse) are commonplace in the US and are on their way over here. Is this the kind of future their client base is imagining?
Eagle-eyed readers of this blog will remember that I once went to an earlier exhibition of Greg’s work on this theme – his Survivors paintings. I asked him what he thought he might end up doing if he lived in the kind of commune he had portrayed. He said he thought he’d probably be a terrible survivor, and went on to predict that men in particular would fall prey to strange new post-apocalyptic schools of thought: ‘I worry about men’s tendency to get lost in beliefs and self-importance and I predict that women would carry the burden of providing following a collapse. I imagine factions, sects, conspiracies and theories occupying the men’s time.’
So would the people pictured in these paintings survive? ‘Ultimately we are adaptable and our happiness is relative to our circumstances. If our expectations become limited then our aspirations shrink to fit, and what we require to survive adapts accordingly.’
Here’s my Q&A about Greg’s work, covering influences, process (what does he listen to?) and research – and what it is that ‘makes his hands itch with wanting to paint’.
You can find out more from Greg’s website.
Regular readers of this blog will know that at the end of October I went to North Cornwall Book Festival and was put up with a number of authors in a farmhouse at St Endellion. If apocalypse had struck and left us stranded there, who knows, we might have all had to turn our hands to agrarian living…
At least we’d have had Patrick Gale to teach us about farming. And perhaps Neel Mukherjee’s experience of scything would have had a practical application in addition to its literary effectiveness (it was undertaken as research for the brilliant scene where Supratik, the revolutionary in The Lives of Others, struggles to learn the technique and keep going in the brutal heat. As Neel explained in conversation with Patricia Duncker at NCBF, he found it extraordinarily difficult and exhausting too…)